"The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one." -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friendship Emerson's essay on Friendship (1841) is essentially a tribute to the ways friendship enhances human lives. In it, he stresses the happiness that two people who meet on common ground can experience. As friendships grow, both parties learn to appreciate and admire the assets and accomplishments of the other and experience joy by observing their successes, according to Emerson. (...) In the presence of a friend, "there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish.". (shrink)

A collection of all but two of the author's philosophical essays and lectures originally published or presented before August 1976.

In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers—The Pittsburgh School—whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to identify something as a manifestation of conceptual capacities is to place it in a space of norms. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that humans are distinctive because they occupy a norm-governed "space of reasons." Along with Sellars, Robert Brandom and John McDowell have tried to (...) work out the implications of that idea for understanding knowledge, thought, norms, language, and intentional action. The aim of this book is to introduce their shared views on those topics, while also charting a few key disputes between them. (shrink)

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior.

Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...